Memorial Cup – the toughest trophy to win?

Sunday’s win by the Vancouver Giants over the Medicine Hat Tigers in the Memorial Cup final showed what’s great and also what is challenging about the winning the title of Canadian major junior hockey, a championship many feel is the most difficult to win in hockey.

“The grind of the whole season, winning your entire playoff run and then playing the best of the best in all of junior hockey, it definitely takes its toll on guys. It’s probably the hardest hockey trophy to win,” said Columbus Blue Jackets centre Manny Malhotra, who played for the Guelph Storm in the 1998 Memorial Cup.

Simple mathematics explains one reason why Memorial Cup wins are so treasured by those who gain them. “You only have four years, maybe five if you play overage, to do it,” said Dallas Stars defenceman Nolan Baumgartner, who won back-to-back Memorial Cups with the Kamloops Blazers in 1994 and 1995. “It’s a tough road.”

The Tigers defeated the Giants in a best-of-seven Western Hockey League final one week earlier, but couldn’t deliver the goods in the one-game showdown that is the Memorial Cup final. Surviving the grind of four rounds of best-of-seven series to emerge victorious is an amazing achievement. “You don’t want to have a letdown after that,” said Dallas Stars left-winger Brenden Morrow, a Memorial Cup winner with the Portland Winter Hawks in 1998. “It’s different for everyone. You have to find a way to get back up. Everyone kind of celebrates winning the league, then you still have another tournament to go to. You’ve got to find a way to get up and prepare again.”

With barely a moment to catch their breath and admire their accomplishment, these teams are not only asked to take it another step further, more often than not they are whisked away to a part of the country they’ve likely never visited, to compete against elite-level teams that they’ve never met previously, facing off in a tournament format where an off night can be a team’s last night. For teams comprised almost exclusively of teenaged boys, it presents a daunting challenge, but Baumgartner believes the key to success is embracing that challenge. “I think that makes it really interesting for you,” he said. “You get there and you play these teams that you haven’t seen all year and obviously, they’re the best from their league. It’s a challenge, but it’s a great time.”

From the moment the teams arrive in the tournament host city, everything differs from the norm. “You’ve never seen these teams before and the format is different,” said Dallas Stars assistant coach Rick Wilson, who was coach Terry Simpson’s assistant with the 1985 Memorial Cup champion Prince Albert Raiders. “Because it’s a single-elimination competition, it’s even more intense.” Some teams figure it out and find the required gear to take it to the next level. Many get left behind. “You’ve got four games,” Baumgartner said. “One bad night and you can be out of the tournament, so once you get down to that tournament, you have to really be focused. There’s a lot of distractions around. There’s a lot of media and when you’re young, that’s sometimes hard to handle. You don’t see that all year and all of sudden, there it is, right in your face. National TV.”

It’s the fine line between winning and losing that makes the Memorial Cup tournament unique. “It’s not your regular playoff where generally the better team over the seven-game series is going to be the one that goes on,” Morrow said. “You have to come up with your best game every night and I think that’s what makes it so much more special.”

For those who come up short during their climb up the mountain, the setback can be devastating and all of the accomplishments during a championship season in their own league suddenly seem to fade. That’s the feeling Malhotra still finds inside of himself when he recalls how the Storm lost the 1998 final to Morrow’s Winter Hawks 4-3 on an overtime goal by Portland’s Bobby Russell. “It’s very heartbreaking, obviously, to make it all the way to the finals and lose,” Malhotra said. “Being so close to the ultimate prize, it is a huge letdown. At the same time, once you step back and take a look at what you accomplished as a team to get to that level, it’s a pretty remarkable feat just to get there. There’s a lot of things when you look back that you take pride in, but again, it’s just not the same as bringing home the trophy. It’s very hard just to get to that level, but once you make it that far, you want to come home with the hardware. There were a lot of positives we took out of that year, a lot of great things we did as a team, but at the end of the day, the ultimate prize is winning the Memorial Cup.”

That’s why those fortunate enough to be still standing at the end of the tournament find it so rewarding and no matter how far they go in hockey or whatever else they achieve, lifting that Memorial Cup remains a treasured moment. “It’s a hard trophy to win,” Wilson said. “It’s a long road, a long, hard road – on buses. If you can get there, that alone is quite an accomplishment. If you can get there and win the tournament, that’s pretty special.”

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